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Discovering Ones Atheism

And my experience is much the same as that of Ms. Sweeney and Dr. Dawkins.

It started just after I was 7 years old and had made my first holy communion. I must have been about 8 years old when I was like, something isn’t right about religion.

It wasn’t until it was time for my confirmation that I acknowledged that something was definitely rotten in Denmark. I recall telling the priest at the interview just before we were confirmed that I had a very difficult time with the concept of faith and that the whole entirety of religion I’d learned up to them was no solace and more to the point it was all so much bovine effluent.

They confirmed me without a hitch. Of course just prior I was resistant to being confirmed in the church. I knew it was all horse shit or equine effluvia and had pretty much stopped going to church at this time. But a judicious bribe was paid me and so I went through with it, for the memory of my dead mother.

But I realize that not everyone had the cognitive capacity to just come out and admit they don’t understand or don’t believe in a God that could be so petty and tyrannical and pretty much an invention of bronze age mind or minds.

And of course just a year or so prior to my confirmation my mother had died. When the priest told my father and I that my mother couldn’t be given the rite of burial by the church it was the only time I respected my father. Because my father’s reaction was to pick that SOB priest up by his neck until such time as that priest capitulated.

So all of that meant my faith was gone. It didn’t help that the entirety of my primary and secondary education was in Catholic schools where they did things like teach us critical thinking skills and then try to get us not to apply them to the Bible we studied a year or so later. Yeah, right.

Interesting. When it was time for my confirmation, I asked my Mom “what’s the point?” She told me it was my commitment to embrace Catholicism and my faith in a god. I said that I had no interest (or belief ) in either, and refused to make my confirmation. It took her 20 years to realize what that meant. It took me five minutes. I’ve never looked back, and have always been open about my distaste for organized religion and prayer, but only officially “came out” as a full fledged, unapologetic Athiest about 10 years ago.